My name is danah boyd and I'm a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder/president of Data & Society. Buzzwords in my world include: privacy, context, youth culture, social media, big data. I use this blog to express random thoughts about whatever I'm thinking.

Taken Out of Context — my PhD dissertation

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties – persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability – and three dynamics – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private – are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

Knowing that I would share my dissertation publicly, I desperately wanted to create a perfect dissertation. Anyone who has been through this process knows how impossible that is. Everyone kept trying to reassure me by promising that no one ever reads a dissertation. (Often this was followed with a snarky remark of “not even your committee.”) Unfortunately, those folks haven’t met the blogosphere. (Or my committee.)

There was a huge part of me that wanted to hole up and not share this document with you, for fear of your criticism. This is not a perfect document. Not even close. There are holes in my argument structure, problems with my description, and loads of places where I can’t help but smack my forehead at my simplicity and lack of depth. With all of its imperfections, there is one very important thing about this document: it is done. And by the end of the process, I accepted the age-old PhD mantra: the only good dissertation is a done dissertation.

I don’t expect you to read this, but I know that for some sick and twisted reason, many of you have an urge to do so. That makes you very weird. Still, I have a favor to ask… if you’re going to take the time to read this beast – or even a single chapter of it – could you share your thoughts? I really want to push this further and deeper. Parts of it will turn into journal articles. Other parts will emerge in a book. The more feedback I get now, the better I can make those future document. So, pretty please, with a cherry on top, could you share your reflections, critiques, concerns? I promise I won’t be mad. In fact, the opposite. I would be most delighted!

Congratulations! Looking forward to reading it, and to your joining the thriving research community in the Northeast! Also, on the off chance that you read comments on your blog sooner than email, please contact me. I have an offer than I hope will interest you.

It is quite interesting. It looks great, and when I say it looks great, I mean it. (granted, I have just read some 40-80 pages)

There is a slight error on page 115/128 in your translation; “ttyl in em”, the “in them” is left off. This may be due to a typesetting error, but it may not… at any rate, I leave it at your discretion.

Having issues with the PDF download. After saving it to my desktop, it says there’s an error with the file, attempts to rebuild it, and then says its can’t open it b/c the file is damaged and could not be repaired.

I really like your writing style. This doesn’t read like an average PhD dissertation, but as a dialogue, almost as a blog post. This is disruptive, bold, and refreshing.

Although I know you didn’t have to include anything in terms of future predictions, I am curious on your take regarding how these patterns will make these teenagers different from our current generation of young adults. To be more specific: What kind of adults will these teenagers be? What will their working styles look like? How will their friendship patterns be modified? How will this sense of lack of geographic boundaries impact their sense of nation and belonging to a certain geographic region? By having access to so much personal information about others, will they tend to be more able to show empathy or will they just anesthetized?

Being a fellow PhD student, I envy you! 🙂 Woo hoo! I hope I can reach that finish line soo..oo.ooon too *cross fingers*
You know what they say – For every action towards graduation there is an equal and opposite distraction. 🙂 Anyway, Congratulations – you truly deserve a good break! Will definitely give it a read, it’s somewhat related to my research (corporate blogs).

Congrats! and thanks for making your dissertation public. Much of your work has been very helpful to me when I explain to parents what exactly it is that their kids are doing in social networks, and to not fear “preadtors” so much. It’s also helped to encourage them to get into social networking spaces and to play themselves with identity, “friending” and other things that many find so baffling. Great job!

Thanks for sharing your dissertation – it’s been interesting to read your work through your blog and other outlets and I look forward to reading your larger text. As we continue to go through the changes we are in right now in terms of how we communicate, it is great to have folks like you out there looking at the changes from a research point-of-view.

Congrats and thanks for posting this! I’m closing in on a topic for my own dissertation and, among the possible ideas, is how social networking can be leveraged to move high schools into the 21st century.

Thank you so much for posting this. And, again – CONGRATS on being done!

Good topic. And, just from reading the abstract, the goals and perspective seem well defined. I am bookmarking your site (via del.icio.us) and, as long as my memory permits, will return to read it through.

Interesting read so far. I’m not sure I can agree that society has artificually segregated teenagers, but then I didn’t research the subject, I’m just going from memory of being one 🙂 Memory tells me that at school, grade-level or age clearly separated teenagers into solid peer groups – the ‘older’ kids don’t mix with the ‘younger’ kids.

You might argue that school creates that segregation artificially, and I agree up to a point. But outside of school, within family groups or with neighbours, or when meeting other families on vacation, age groups tend to gather together and exclude those who are too young or too old. The barriers seems to be drawn on multiple levels – physical size and strength will separate youth in sporting events, musical taste, that elusive quality ‘maturity’, gender, interests (chess, football or ponies?) etc. All of these and many more will create different groups among children of all ages, but age is always a factor. Those same groupings exist in adult life but, from my own observation at least, once we reach 30 or so, age segregation largely disappears – but never totally.

Leaping sideways – I’m intrigued by your use of the word ‘queer’. I presume you intend it to mean ‘unusual’ in some form or another, but like many words it has multiple connotations (at least one being offensive) and so I wondered if it had some specific meaning in your particular academic sphere. I personally prefer to either avoid confusing terms, or t least explain myself 🙂 Given your extended discussion on the use of the term ‘private’, I certainly felt like clarification on the use of the term ‘queer’ was warranted.

Congratulations, danah. The methodology section is invaluable to those of us trying to better understand the theoretical “borderlands” between network publics and unmediated publics. I will have more notes and comments soon.

Having done a thesis, I know about a tenth of how hard it is. So hats off, well done and now I can look forward to reading it. I almost pressed print on it at work, lucky i had a quick check of how long it was.
Again, nice work. I’m sure it may be one of the most read dissertations ever.

Congratulations on a massive and focused effort finally accomplished. No guarantees, but I certainly hope to find the time to read it. If I do, I’ll be looking for something to criticize – hopefully a fundamental assumption I can disagree with. If that happens, please don’t take it in a bad way. I will always have the highest regard for your intelligence, your compassion, and your iconoclastic spirit.

Congratulations! My advisor told me the same thing about striving for the perfect dissertation….. “the best dissertation is the done dissertation!” I would like to read it as well, and I applaud your request for feedback. Keep in mind, pat on the back comments won’t make you grow…. those that make you stretch your original thoughts will give you rich perspectives for follow-up work.
Best regards,
Melissa Hughes

Danah, I would love to read your thesis but it is not possibile to do it on the screen. I wonder if you could reformat it so that it is not necessary to print 400 pages: just to save some some threes 🙂
Thanks. Nicola

I’m interested to see a discussion of mediating online identity in there, and really pleased to see Haraway included, even if it is a quick mention. I had similar issues with defining “identity” in my MA thesis as you do at the start of chapter 4; you definitely did a better job unpackaging that term and defining it for your work than I did.

I like that you delve so deeply into profile construction, but I’m not certain you went far enough; surely the SNS sites themselves influence the creation of their users’ identities through the affordances supplied by their interfaces – the sites defining who the users become, rather than the users defining the sites – a side effect of their postings and profiles being normalized, broken apart, and reassembled (a la N. Katherine Hayles’ Flickering Signifiers”). With LiveJournal, for example, whether you are naturally a social person or not, a community is impressed upon you by the way their profile page is set up, asking for geographic location and interests, so that you can find like users easily (and they you).

Mind you, that’s my schtick, so perhaps I’m a bit biased towards the ghost in the machine having an effect on production of identity argument. Regardless of my meager thoughts on the matter, congratulations again on finishing the dissertation and thanks for sharing it with us.

Congratulations on finishing! I’m looking so forward to reading your work. Your attention to detail and writing style makes for a very enjoyable read (something that cannot be said of most dissertations). Your work inspires me to keep on writing–I’m hoping to have mine completed in the next 6-7 months.

Congrats on finishing (we must have hit the finish line right about the same time) and I’m looking forward to getting a look at the whole thing after my very occasional reads of the bits and pieces along the way!

Having not read the thesis, but seeing your comments on the Internet Safety task force, I hope there are elements in your study that link back to previous views of teenager behaviors and look forward to the time when MySpace (already dying) and Facebook fade from memory to the next thing. I assume the same issues will be there.

I am so happy for you. Finishing at last. C’est fini! Génial!
I’ll read naturally, as I was expecting for this piece of work. And I will share my comments. Thank you very much for sharing!
And have a nice day!